More Than a Memory
by girlofgold
Summary: Takes place during an altered version of the Battle of Hogwarts while Ginny is in the Room of Requirement. Ginny reflects on her experiences with Tom Riddle, then Voldemort pays her a visit.


Ginny was eleven when she first met him; he was sixteen. She was a scared and lonely girl and he was a strong and confident boy. He spoke to her in ink, carefully scrawled on the parchment pages of a diary she always kept close. He was her first friend and, later, her first enemy.

After the incident, she told her parents and the Headmaster that, yes, it was she who opened the chamber that she wrote in the diary and that yes, Tom wrote back. She even told them some of what he had said, but she couldn't tell them what happened that last time beyond that she had seen him, if only just for a moment. Those memories were gone.

She was thirteen when the memories started coming back—when _he_ came back. She would wake up in the middle of the night, choking back a scream. She would then lie awake for hours in her room in Grimmauld Place listening to the creeks and groans of the old house and the silence of the other sleeping occupants. She never told anyone what she remembered or even that she _could_ remember.

In the dark of the night, the summer after his return, however, she remembered. She saw, for the first time, what he looked like. She had pictured him many times, with the little memory she had before everything went blank, but she never really knew until that summer. Tom had been corporeal that last time in the chamber; faint and very nearly translucent at first, but he was there and she could reach her hand out and…she had touched him. In her bed, her sheets pooled around her rather than pulled over her in the summer heat, she shivered. She had _touched_ him—and he had touched her as well. That first touch and a whisper of his voice later, she could remember feeling dizzy.

Safe in Grimmauld Place, her parents just down the hall, she would reflect on what came next with confusion. He held tightly to her arms as her strength gave out, supporting her and holding her up for a moment before gently lowering her to the ground. She couldn't even stay sitting for long, but from her spot on the damp cold ground, she could watch him. He knelt next to her, near enough to touch her, and his hand caressed her hair and then her cheek. He had stayed next to her until her eyelids fluttered closed. She came to hate him for his memory-self's actions that night because she couldn't understand _why_—for, while his actions seemed kind, the look of contempt in his eyes was anything but.

She was sixteen when she first saw Lord Voldemort. He appeared to her in the Room of Requirement during the final battle and upon seeing him; she could not have hated him more. For what he had done to so many people as well as what he had done to her.

"Do you remember me?" she asked. It was a question she had wondered of ever since Harry had announced during the Tri-Wizard Tournament that he was back. Did he remember what he made her do? Did he remember all that he had told her? Did he remember the way he had _touched_ her and the way he had _looked_ at her when he was trying to kill her?

His head tilted just slightly and he made a very inhumane sound she would later assume to be a derisive laugh. "Still the silly, stupid little girl, aren't you?" he responded and, despite the radical change in his appearance since she had last seen him, she recognized that look in his eyes. Were she still eleven, she might have cried; as it was, she was too angry. Whether he was real or a product of the Room, she was too angry to be scared.

Surprising her, he had his wand out in front of her and had knocked her down before she could move; and just as before, he crouched down before her, this time between her open legs.

Breathing hard, she clutched her wand in her hands and pointed it at him, but he whispered a command and her wand jumped right into his hand. She pushed her now empty hands against the floor and tried to move away, but his free hand reached for her leg and pulled her back.

"I hate you," she hissed at him as she kicked her captured leg in defiance.

He nodded but otherwise stayed silent; his eyes seemed to be taking careful note of every inch of her. His hand moved up her leg slowly, his grip never loosening. He roughly grips her inner thigh before moving his hand upward and holding her down by pushing down just enough on her chest, his hands between her breasts.

Ginny was paralyzed—not with fear, but with realization. That look of disgust in his eyes when she was younger was still there but, obviously, his interest in her body had only increased. _That_ was the 'why' she hadn't been able to understand two years prior.

Ginny gasps at her newfound knowledge and whispers, not expecting him to care, "No."

Then, before she can blink, he is gone. She pulls herself up into a sitting position and looks around in desperate confusion, but he is nowhere to be found. Her wand, once in his hand, she saw lying across the room.

She was also sixteen when she last saw Tom. There was this moment, this brief moment after Harry revealed himself to have been alive after all, and right before Harry defeated Voldemort, where Tom seemed to appear in a reflection in Voldemort's eyes.

Afterwards, during the victory celebrations, she managed to convince herself that it never happened. She convinces herself that she imagined it—just as she had imagined him in the Room of Requirement—but sometimes when someone touches her, she is reminded of the way his hand felt on her body and she cannot help but wonder.


End file.
